On Racists Abroad

I’m in Bangkok, on the Khao San road, a legendary backpacker and traveller spot. I sit down at an empty table because I can see the Champions League game on the television. A man comes and joins me. We clink glasses, we talk about Bangkok. We talk about our different nationalities. I speak to him about the assassination of the former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. We talk about England. He tells me that he likes my country. He speaks English, he loves English football. Fish and chips! He tells me that we do need to get a grip on our immigration problem. He is black. He tells me this means that he knows what he’s talking about. 

I move on. I head to Rambuttri Street, parallel to the Khao San road. More quiet, less manic. I take a seat and order a large Leo beer with a metal bucket of ice. They drink ice with their beer here, because the beer goes warm faster than the beer goes watery. It’s a race against time. Two men are sitting at the next table over. A bald Swedish man in a black Ben Sherman polo shirt with yellow trim on the collar. Don’t skip ahead. A cheerful Burmese man. We get talking. We play games like, how old are you? We talk about Bangkok. We talk about the changing state of the tourist districts. We talk about the reasons people stay and the reasons people leave.

We accidentally start talking about politics. The Swedish man, after a brief interlude, says, look: I respect what you’re doing in this country. This freedom march you just had. Tommy Robinson. People are together all over the world. And I say, well in my country Tommy Robinson is regarded as far right. He agrees, after a brief talk, that it’s wrong to chant “Allah is a paedo” outside of a mosque. He was under the belief it was just about freedom. Listen, he says. I appreciate that. You’re from the UK. If that’s what is happening, I appreciate it.

He is a cunt who is full of shit. 

I love Thailand. I love that you can be walking down a road alone at night and two unrelated people will offer you a lift on their moped. I love that you can meet some strangers in a bar and they’ll take you to the top of a mountain for sunrise, to drink coffee in a tribal village and eat chargrilled mochi pancakes. I love that you don’t even know what a bar and a restaurant is, that sometimes it looks like someone has just opened their garage and stuck a trestle table and some plastic chairs out of it, and you’ll collapse after sweating through all your clothes and make a helpless food-to-mouth gesture because you tried to say “khao soi” and they looked at you in askance. And they’ll serve you food of some sort, and a cold beer too, because you know what Leo is, and you know what beer is, and they’ll give you some sort of outrageous slow cooked sticky thing on a plastic plate which kicks your teeth so hard through your mouth that they ding your uvula. I love Thailand.

I’m tired of the people visiting Thailand. 

*

In Chiang Mai my friend and I are drinking in a smoking garden outside a trendy music bar in which some of the best live music I think I’ve ever heard is going on. First a virtuosic blues outfit with two soloists sawing across each other and a vocalist channeling Etta James. My eyes are wet. Then some sort of post-rock jazz instrumental outfit who sound like Colin Stetson run through an arena soundsystem. It’s stunning. It scorches itself into my consciousness. I tell lots of people at once that it’s one of the best gigs of my life because I think it might be true.

The American we meet is a Trump supporter. She believes he’s actually bringing the global proletariat together. She thinks he is a unifying figure. She isn’t sure what lies he has supposedly told but she’d sure turn on him if she found out he’d been dishonest. She’s charming and giggling. She’s a laugh. 

In a more remote town, I find a lodge to myself. At night I am kept awake by the riotous buzzing, shrieking, trilling and rustling of the jungle twilight. There is only a single nearby bar. The first night I go there I meet an American expat regular who might as well be welded to the walls. It’s a beautiful little bar. We’re outside of high season so I go one night and it’s just me and the landlady all night, playing pool and doing shots of some spirit that she made. I only meet the American for the first night for about an hour, but I tell him where I’m staying. The next morning he knocks on my door and wakes me up. See, I told him the night before that we should go for breakfast the next day, but in a kind of disconnected British way. Yeah man. We should do anything you want. He turns up at my door.

He takes me on a drive. We go to a little puddle that he knows about where, for reasons unknown to the local population, butterflies gather. It might be that they’re chasing some particular mineral in the soil, pushed out by the fluvial action of decades of landslides and glacial reordering. Sure enough there they are, thick as thieves, wings blurring together into a single iridescent, black-and-shimmer beast. He tells me about his favourite butterfly. It looks like a leaf.

We drive down the road to a local café. He introduces me to the owner, who grows and roasts his own coffee beans. He shows me the machine he’s made to roast his beans. It’s an old milk jug, attached to something which might once have been a rotary mower. In fact as we arrive they’re almost done. The smell of burned coffee hangs in the air like a campfire. He tilts the device and they cascade out over some fine mesh over a wooden tray, to better remove the detritus. 

In the café we drink the coffee that comes out of the other end. I eat pad kra pao, the omnipresent Thai lunch, breakfast and dinner. Holy basil, fried egg, sliced cucumber, chilli relish, protein to preference. He tells me that he was an artist in New York in the 90s. He shows me his portfolio. Gorgeously rendered paintings loom out of the pages. He tells me the story of the models. How one had a screen printing business. Another he met in Harlem. “I normally model with no clothes on,” she tells him. 

He tells me that it’s 90% Jewish businessmen who control the economy. He tells me that political correctness has overtaken university campuses. There was once a time where they were the pure expression of critical thinking, but no longer. He thinks, for some reason, that Reagan wanted this. He tells me that, obviously, he doesn’t believe in this climate control BS. 

A few nights on and he’s at the bar. I meet some new friends, an English man and his other half. We bond over our mutual love of literature. He’s a classicist, so he appreciates a librarian. We both write. We talk about historical fiction. He makes the occasional self-deprecating comment about how he is, ha ha, a bit of a traditionalist as a classicist.

I start to get the sinking feeling that I am very tired of feeling.

Close your eyes and imagine the rest of the evening. He believes in common sense. He believes that principle isn’t politics. He believes that division is the thing holding us apart. He believes that Douglas Murray is a wanker but he agrees with some of the things he said. And, god help me, god save my fucking soul, I try to steer us clear of the bad topics. The ones which I know will kick in the door of this evening as surely as a police raid. Shattered plywood flying everywhere. Flashing lights, get on the fucking floor, get on the floor, show us your hands. Oh well, we were sleeping peacefully. But not any more. 

You know how this story ends. It’s with me walking out, shamefaced and humiliated, because I simply wasn’t able to accept the proffered evidence that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to play the sports they want. The thought of them snickering about seeing off an easily-offended woke stranger makes my blood boil, because I still have pride. But I’m used to it, because this is Thailand. 

*

Travel broadens the mind. Really, it does! The mind is not a concrete thing. It comes shaped by culturally engrained beliefs of how we live and how we cannot live. There is nothing better than exposure to new lives and new ways of being to open you up, morally, politically, personally, to a better and more rewarding life. And that also means taking people as they are. It means not tossing away the bowl of khao soi because the man who served it shouted at his wife. It means not interjecting on an off-colour remark about immigration. It means sitting and eating your horrible porridge while someone who, listen mate, I recognise I’m privileged, I’m not denying it, tells you that he thinks it’s important to have strong borders.

When does an open mind become a skip? I have to believe that I have principles, and they are always in negotiation. What is the most racism I would accept? Which misogynists are harmless? Nobody alive fails to make this calculation. Family members, strangers in the street, travellers in the hostel. Can you live your life in maximum, megawatt fury? Should I?

More and more I think that we should. I can’t listen to another right wing chancer hold forth, even if he believes in gay rights and smoking weed and actually isn’t this such a spiritual country? How many of these before your soul is tarnished? Why should we not have principles? 

In Chiang Mai my friend and I meet a Brit at a pool table. He’s an expat and a long-term Thailand resident. He’s of similar age to us. He submits to being an Arsenal fan but cuts me short before I try to talk to him about Riccardo Calafiori’s inverted role. Don’t worry, I tell him. I have other things to talk about. And then we slither, inevitably, shamefully, towards politics again. And, God bless him, he says he loves Jeremy Corbyn. That he’s unabashedly left wing. That he never, ever, ever talks about politics with any farang in Thailand, because the answer is always bad. 

*

Agnes Callard’s essay for the New Yorker, Against Travel, makes the argument that travel is essentially about cultivating a self-image. We do places. We don’t visit them so much as happen to them. We are all the protagonists of our own reality and travel is the sharpened point of this. We punch into new towns and they leave grooves on us like a shell casing. The degree to which this is any different to any other form of self-expression is up for debate but the core of it is nickel-plated. 

So how much of this is it normal to endure?

Thailand, I’m sure, is thick with communists. It is also a massive, beautiful, immensely popular tourist destination. It seems plausible at this moment that if you were to pick a random civilian from the global population, Rollercoaster Tycoon style, and investigate their thoughts, they’d be calling you a slur. I want to get off the Globalists’ Wild Ride. Pound for pound, those people are here. And so my own, beautiful, subjective, unstoppable force, meets the immovable object. Not the fascists so much as my own profoundly held beliefs not to truck with these people. 

Should I choke the vomit back down? Perhaps I should be at it hammer and tongs every night in a bar, trying desperately to persuade some internet-poisoned headcase that vaccines don’t cause autism or people aren’t transitioning so they can batter women at sports. Or perhaps I should be at home, engaged in the same dance with British people, except that when I’m at home I don’t feel the need to collapse into political discussion with people because neither of us are groping helplessly towards commonality. “What’s the deal with your country anyway” is fraught with danger. This is the first sign to pretend to go to the toilet. Return me to the warm, amniotic sac of talking about football, or my own friend-group bubble that comes attached to its own left wing ecosystem. 

*

Here’s the obvious answer, and it’s one that the Englishman provides to me. We can discuss this as friends. There’s no reason for this to be emotive. We can approach this from opposite sides. Even if we believe that the other holds contrary views, that’s no reason to make a moral judgement. We can have a good night. But somehow, several points later, nobody’s having a good time. I am begging him to change the subject. Even now I’m a coward. I’m not making a stand here. I’m telling him that we don’t need to do this. That we have very divergent positions. That, god help me, I just want this to go away. 

Only now it’s him who won’t let me. He won’t even let me rest in my cowardice. He swings wildly between arguments. He tells me that I don’t believe in his anecdote. I say I respect his anecdote but I believe in social forces. He tells me I need to tell that to the women he knows who have had their noses broken by a man pretending to be a woman so he can win MMA fights. We’re not talking about Bernard Cornwell any more. I can’t escape. I can’t weasel out. We’re both locked in his awful death grip now. The night, what was left of it, has been choked out. It lies blue on the floor, foam around its lips. 

So we excise a chunk of our heads. We recognise the things about which we must not speak and we do not speak about them. We do not speak about the things we believe. We do not speak about the things which hurt us and the things which define our interactions with the world. We don’t talk about politics. We don’t talk about immigration. We certainly, Jesus Christ, are you out of your mind, we don’t talk about Israel. We don’t talk about genocide. Because if you talk about Gaza on Ko Pha Ngan you will have throngs of Israeli travellers, expats and local businessmen (Israelis are buying up a lot of land on the Thai islands) review bombing your little café. 

So we exist in a split consciousness. Anyone you meet anywhere in the world could believe that someone you love should be killed. And you either deaden yourself to that fact, accept that your trip and your principles are in disharmony and the trip is more important, or you ruin another night because the fish hook is wedged deep in your cheek, and you don’t know how to spit it out. 

Olof Palme, by the way. Look it up.